Perfect: cobble together an obscenely irrational hybrid of religion and science in the vain attempt to appease everyone at once, and what do you get? Something to annoy everyone at once.
Oh, no. I spent a long day traveling, getting my daughter to the airport in Minneapolis so she could fly off to Phoenix for 10 weeks of research (she has arrived, and seems a bit shocked to be in a desert), and then I drove all the way back. I sit down to see what has happened in the world, and discover that Charlotte Allen hates me. She doesn’t like you much, either. And she got her little tirade published in the LA Times. Let’s take a look and see what she doesn’t like about us.
Her opening is clear. She thinks we’re “crashing bores”. A hint for Ms. Allen: never start an essay by declaring your subject to be boring. Either your readers will stop at that point, or they’ll read on and discover that despite your claim, you seem to be concerned enough to write on at excessive length about something that is supposedly boring.
Second paragraph: she says something about Eagleton. I read Eagleton’s book, and didn’t recognize her summation (Dawkins and Hitchens indulged in “a philosophically primitive opposition of faith and reason that assumes that if science can’t prove something, it doesn’t exist”), either from the Eagleton book or from the statements of either Hitchens or Dawkins. This line of argument doesn’t last beyond one paragraph, however — perhaps because there is no way she can defend it — and she quickly drops any pretense of wanting to engage a substantive argument. Instead, she tells us more specifically why we’re boring.
My problem with atheists is their tiresome — and way old — insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation with the fine points of Christianity. What — did their Sunday school teachers flog their behinds with a Bible when they were kids?
Well, personally, I don’t feel that I’m opressed. I’ve pointed out before that it’s awfully easy for an atheist to just keep his or her mouth shut and pass for a believer. My usual theme instead is to show what a botch theists have made of the country, and how hypocritical they are, and how absurd their beliefs are. But otherwise, yes, we do have de facto discrimination against the godless in America; we have some blatant examples, and of course there is the obvious fact that one must be a professing believer to get elected to office in most places in this country. All Allen musters against this evidence is the claim that atheists are a tiny minority (which makes it all right to discriminate, I guess?), and there are only six states with anti-atheist clauses in their constitutions. Logic…not her strong suit.
As for the claim that we’re fixated on the “fine points of Christianity”, I don’t think so. Atheists are more concerned with the basics: where is the evidence for a god, any god? Some of us are a bit fascinated with the Christian obsession with the details of ritual and dogma in the absence of any reason to accept their core beliefs, but that’s not our weird fixation, Ms. Allen — it’s yours.
Then there is an incoherent middle where she just flames on about how mean atheists are (I call them all horrible names, you see), never seeming to notice that all she is doing is spouting angry vitriol about atheists. Gripe, gripe, gripe. The only time she even tries to state what the position of theists might be is in her closing paragraph, and again, she’s oblivious to the problem with her position.
What atheists don’t seem to realize is that even for believers, faith is never easy in this world of injustice, pain and delusion. Even for believers, God exists just beyond the scrim of the senses. So, atheists, how about losing the tired sarcasm and boring self-pity and engaging believers seriously?
Yes? We know you work hard to maintain a belief in a loving, personal god in the absence of evidence and the existence of facts that contradict you. We agree with you that it is remarkably unlikely and difficult to understand. We also agree that the existence of god is something you can’t sense — we can’t sense it either. Whenever we engage you seriously this is the same stuff we get, over and over again: we’re just supposed to believe in the absence of your ability to explain why we should.
There simply isn’t anything to engage in Allen’s howl of outrage. I’m a little surprised that something so shallow and empty could get published in the LA Times at all, especially with Charlotte Allen’s track record. My only previous encounter with her was an astonishing rant in the Washington Post, in which she flatly claimed that women were dumber than men. Seriously. While claiming there was no difference in average intelligence.
It should be impossible to take this raving crazy loon seriously, but somehow she’s getting published in major newspapers. That’s the real mystery.
President George W. Bush was a god-fearing child given control of our military apparatus…or perhaps he was a child manipulated by a military that found religion a convenient hook. Frank Rich describes the internal propaganda used during the war. What I find shocking is that Bush received regular intelligence briefings with covers that invoked a combination of G.I. Joe war imagery and militaristic bible verses.
Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)
What’s up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary’s actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world’s apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout “would be as bad as Abu Ghraib.”
Well, now they’ve leaked. Here’s an example.
It’s appalling on so many levels: that Rumsfeld thought that polishing up his report with the jingoistic equivalent of a clear plastic binder would win him points; that it apparently worked; that religion was used to promote war in the White House; that it was used despite the fact that it could worsen our chances of success. And we still have Dick Cheney doing a cheerful media tour encouraging us to support torture, which really wasn’t torture, but if it was, it was good for us.
We lived under the rule of monsters for eight years. We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, we need to fight back in the courts to condemn these people and their actions.
Sunday’s episode of Atheists Talk radio may just annoy me — they’re going to be talking about a local joint Bible study between atheists and a Methodist church. There are some atheists who like to dig into the Bible, but I’m not one of them — been there, done that, found it to be worthless drivel. Maybe you’ll find it more interesting than I do.
The second half is more promising, with an interview with a board member of the UM student group, Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists. Yay students!
Also tomorrow, I’m getting rid of my daughter — we have to drive in to the Minneapolis airport to toss her on a plane to Arizona, where she’s going for a summer internship in biomedical informatics. I may find myself at Q. Cumbers restaurant to check out their intelligently designed salad bar in the morning, where the Bible-studying atheists can correct my ways. Any other local people care to join in?
As I’ve mentioned before, I really truly want to win an iPod Touch from Eric Hovind. You’ve been clicking on this link every day, haven’t you? Click a few more times if you haven’t.
This is a nice little interview, with the curious restriction that it was specifically limited to only 5 minutes.
Abby will be pleased that when the interviewer brings up his reputation as “Darwin’s Rottweiler”, he points out that Rottweilers are quite nice dogs…which is also a good metaphor for the interview!
I was sent a petition to call for conscious evolution. I have no idea what this means. I don’t think the creators of this petition have the slightest idea, either. I don’t even understand the point of pledging to “elevate consciousness”. I do know that these loons seem to like the word “evolution” an awful lot, abusing the term to the point where I want to just slap it out of their hands and tell them “NO! Not until you learn what it actually means.”
And, of course, it is somehow being appropriated by these kooks to imply something about spirituality. Here’s the fluff they write.
We now realize that we are affecting our own evolution by everything we do. This knowledge awakens in us the aspiration to become more conscious through subjective practices including meditation, reflection, prayer, intuition, creativity, and conscious choice making that accelerate our evolution in the direction of unity consciousness and inspire us to deeply align our collective vision.
Gaah! What vacuous nonsense! This is written by a group of people who call themselves “the evolutionary leaders” — what they actually are is an assortment of pop New Age con artists who primarily make a living peddling books that sell ridiculous woo to a mass market.
I signed the pledge, mainly because they ask for your recommendations for what they can do to promote ‘consciousness evolution’. Here’s what I told them.
Teach critical thinking. Laugh at woo-meisters who push vapid idiocy like meditation and prayer and spirituality. Turn away from the lies of religion. Point out the bullshit in the empty noises of people like Deepak Chopra. Learn something about evolution, which has nothing to do with the fuzzy, sloppy, lazy goo these so-called “evolutionary leaders” are babbling about.
I’m #39,109 — I won’t be surprised if my signature is expunged.
Baroness Susan Greenfield has been spouting off some bad neuroscience, I’m afraid. She’s on an anti-social-networking-software, anti-computer-games, anti-computer crusade that sounds a bit familiar — it’s just like the anti-TV tirades I’ve heard for 40-some years — and a little bit new — computers are bad because they are “changing the workings of the brain“. Ooooh.
But to put that in perspective, the brain is a plastic organ that is supposed to rewire itself in response to experience. It’s what they do. The alternative is to have a fixed reaction pattern that doesn’t improve itself, which would be far worse. Greenfield is throwing around neuroscientific jargon to scare people.
So yes, using computers all the time and chatting in the comments sections of weird web sites will modify the circuitry of the brain and have consequences that will affect the way you think. Maybe I should put a disclaimer on the text boxes on this site. However, there are events that will scramble your brains even more: for example, falling in love. I don’t want to imagine the frantic rewiring that has to go on inside your head in response to that, or the way it can change the way you see the entire rest of the world, for good or bad, for the whole of your life.
Or, for an even more sweeping event that had distinct evolutionary consequences, look at the effect of changing from a hunter-gatherer mode of existence, to an agrarian/urban and modern way of life. We get less exercise because of that, suffer from near-sightedness, increased the incidence of infectious disease, and warped our whole pattern of activity in radical ways. Not only do neural pathways have to develop in different ways to cope with different environments, but there was almost certainly selection for urban-compatible brains—people have died of the effects of that shift. Will Baroness Greenfield give up her book-writin’, lecturin’ ways to fire-harden a pointy stick, don a burlap bag, and dedicate her life to hunting rabbits?
Warren Ellis set his readers to a task: to draw an old pulp comic book character, the Octopus. The Octopus had a stunning description.
One of the more outré of the pulp characters-and given the genre, that’s quite saying something, believe me-the Octopus was actually the villain of the piece in his single issue, The Octopus v1 #4, 1939, written by…well, it’s not exactly clear. It might be Norvel Page, or it might be Ejler and Edith Jacobsen. A rather over-the-top mad scientist, the Octopus worked from a big city hospital and plotted world conquest. His appearance might explain his desire to dominate the world; he’s sea-green, with four “suction-cupped weaving tentacles” set above “hideously malformed” legs. He wears a small mask, and behind it can be seen two enormous, luminous, purple eyes. He was the leader of the Purple Eyes, a cult bent on world domination and mass destruction. The Octopus’ chosen method was an “ultra-violet ray” which devolved men and women and turned them into deformed, life-hating monsters hungry for human flesh and glowing with “ultraviolet purple.” Against the Octopus was set Jeffrey Fairchild, a young millionaire philanthropist (he eventually stopped the Octopus, of course). He had three identities. The first was Jeffrey Fairchild, hospital administrator. The second was was kindly Dr. Skull, the old man who made a practice of helping the poor in the slums. (His good works didn’t help him when everyone thought that he was the Octopus, however) In his other identity he was the “Skull Killer,” who fought crime and left a skull-imprint, ala the Spider, on his enemies. Fairchild was assisted by Carol Endicott, Dr. Skull’s nurse.
There were a lot of submissions, but so far I like this one best:
I thought about cheating and just sending in a photo of myself, but darn it, my eyes aren’t purple.
Daniel Hauser, the 13 year old Minnesota boy with the dual affliction of Hodgkin lymphoma and idiots for parents, has been told that he can’t refuse effective medical treatments.
In a 58-page ruling Friday, Brown County District Judge John Rodenberg found that Daniel Hauser has been “medically neglected” and is in need of child protection services.
Rodenberg said Daniel will stay in the custody of his parents, but Colleen and Anthony Hauser have until May 19 to get an updated chest X-ray for their son and select an oncologist.
The judge wrote that Daniel has only a “rudimentary understanding at best of the risks and benefits of chemotherapy. … he does not believe he is ill currently. The fact is that he is very ill currently.”
I might feel differently about this if the kid had been well informed and was consciously making a decision to die, but he wants to live and has been lied to by the deluded pseudo-Indian religious kooks he has for parents, and by the quacks who have been giving him medical advice.
